Hard drives from the last 20 years are now slowly dying.
Not really. Disk is king now since S3 storage took the crown when cloud services started offering cheap archiving. Anything still on disk from the 90s is some neglected archive that has been deemed by the company to have no value.
I would assume they’re finding this out now because they’re trying to feed their whole archive to the AI beast.
Disk is king when you need lots of active storage.
When it comes to archival Tape is king. I would never trust an HDD to be left unpowered for years like you could a tape cartridge.
And a single LTO9 cartridge can hold 18TBs for dirt cheap compared to the equivalent HDD
S3 Glaciers practices are secretive, but it’s almost certainly tape based
I don’t disagree with you that tape has a different value prop, but I sell backup systems and almost nobody I sell to uses tape anymore. The truth with tape is that it’s a cheap media, but you still need to pay someone to vault it for you, it cannot be accessed easily, it makes physical moves which cause damage and tape drive tech is still one of the most complicated things in the Datacenter.
Most companies I deal with want the data to be “online” in at least some form that can be easily accessed for AI, lawsuits, new research, business continuity, etc. Tape allows none of that, and so the value of it is pretty limited. The truth these days is I can stuff a TB of data into cloud archive, with instant retrieval, for really, really cheap, with like 99.99999999999% data durability guarantees.
Yeah no, thats not an “archive” you are talking about thats just a bunch of storage. Archives are for things like historical, government, artistic data. That stuff sits in airtight cases on tape storage in a bunker.
Obviously any drive that is constantly in use to deliver data to customers is gonna die, thats never going to change. But these were actually intended to be used for archiving but failed at doing exactly that.
Archive is whatever companies want it to be. I’ve been told anything that’s not microfilm isn’t an archive, so there you go.
You’re currently having a conversation on an article about cold storage. The comment you replied to was about this article, and hence also about cold storage. It makes absolutely no sense to come into this conversation saying that they’re wrong about how cold storage works because your experience with hot storage doesn’t line up.
No one really knows, and Amazon won’t say. There’s speculation it’s tape, low-rpm drives connected to custom logic boards, Blu ray, etc.
It’s almost certainly tape, a single LTO9 cartridge can hold 18TBs of data for cheap compared to the equivalent drive.
Blu-ray is unlikely, only quad layer BR have a decent capacity at 125GB each and quality ones are hard to find these days. Sony has even stopped making their blu ray based Optical Disk Archival system thing.